FROM THE CONVENOR
2010 NATIONAL FOLKLORE CONFERENCE
NEWS ROUNDUP
WA FOLKLIFE PROJECT 2004-2009
THE DIVERSITY OF AUSTRALIAN TRADITIONAL MUSIC

FROM THE CONVENOR

In this 30th edition of Transmissions we bring our usual roundup of news, information and contacts from the wide expanses of Australian folklore, and beyond.

The AFN’s 6th National Folklore Conference takes place on April Fool’s Day next and is well in hand, as reported below.

The account of the WA Folkife Project 2004-2009 is a good example of how links between fieldworkers, libraries and universities can foster the collection, preservation and dissemination of traditions from a wide variety of community groups.

Another project by an AFN member is the Sydney Folklore project (http://warrenfahey.com/fos.htm) carried out by the indefatigable Warren Fahey. This provides an example of a different but no less fruitful approach to gathering and disseminating the traditions of a large urban community.

We’d like to present details of other fieldwork and research projects by AFN members, so please send them in.

2010 NATIONAL FOLKLORE CONFERENCE

Planning proceeds for the 6th of these conferences organised by the AFN in conjunction with the National Library and the National Folk Festival. The 2010 conference will take place on April Fool’s Day (April 1) and is already shaping up as another fascinating look at current research, fieldwork and dissemination of aspects of Australian folklore.

A couple of presentation opportunities remain for 20 minute papers on any aspect of Australian or Australian-related folklore. If you would like to submit a proposal for consideration, please contact Graham Seal at g.seal@curtin.edu.au

NEWS ROUNDUP

D. K. WILGUS COLLECTION OF BALLADS AND FOLKSONGS

Part of this important American collection is now available for online listening.

D. K. Wilgus and Wayland D. Hand established Folklore studies at UCLA, and together founded the Folklore and Mythology Program in 1965. Wilgus was a folksong and ballad scholar, indefatigable fieldworker, and renowned authority on Anglo-American folksong, "race" records, and "hillbilly" music. He directed five folk music festivals at UCLA. He was Chair of the Folklore Program for 17 years. Many of the field recordings of American and Irish folk music in this collection are his or those of David Evans, one of his students (a noted authority on blues). This collection was originally part of the Folklore and Mythology Department, but in Fall 2002 was acquired by the Ethnomusicology Archive.

Imagine 30,000 singers and a 300, 000 audience giving voice to traditional song together. It happens in Estonia. Read a Journal of Folklore Research review of the book that investigates this singing nation at http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=860

MUSIC AT WAR

Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War. By Jonathan Pieslak. 2009. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 216 pages. ISBN: 978-0-253-35323-8 (hard cover), 978-0-253-22087-5 (soft cover). Read a Journal of Folklore Research review at http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=844

This music project is primarily interested in the traditional social dance music of England - where it came from, where it went to, who it travelled with and where it is now. http://www.village-music-project.org.uk/

NATIONAL FOLKLORE SUPPORT CENTRE (INDIA) PORTAL

The *NFSC Portal for Journals* has launched a new initiative -- *NFSC Books and Monographs*. This is novel attempt to create a platform to publish online books and monographs related to the discipline of folklore. In the absence of an equivalent software for publishing books and monographs online we have customized the Open Journal System for this.

You can now view *Simon Charsley*'s book '*Madiga and Dalit: Exploring the Heritage*' online. Discussions to publish more books are under way.
We are happy to extend this facility to scholars worldwide dealing with folklore. Interested scholars can contact muthu@indianfolklore.org.

The Western Australian Folklore Project was initiated in 2004 as a partnership between the National Library of Australia, the Australian Folklore Network and the Australian Folklore Research Unit at Curtin University. Funding and recording equipment is supplied by the National Library, with the Folklore Network and the Folklore Research Unit providing background, contacts, general facilitation, institutional support and general hosting. Rob and Olya Willis carried out the fieldwork, recordings and documentation of the collected materials, including photographs, some video and indexing. These materials are deposited in the National Library of Australia and in the Western Australian Folklore Archive in the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library at Curtin University.

The fieldworkers produced a substantial body of important collected material that would otherwise remain undocumented. In addition, all those interviewed and the communities to which they belong have all expressed their enjoyment of the experience and their appreciation at having their cultural traditions acknowledged and recorded by such institutions as the National Library and Curtin University.

The first year of the project took place in Perth, Fremantle, southwest WA and the Pilbara. It led to the documenting of Ukrainian and Swiss musical traditions, including yodelling. The now-retired country music pioneer performer, Rick Carey was also recorded during this trip, as was Rock & Roll historian John Dubber. An important counter-tradition concerning the outlaw Jandamarra (‘Pigeon’) was documented in the Pilbara, together with indigenous children’s play traditions. Fifteen extended individual and group interviews, some with video of group performances, were completed.

In 2005 the fieldworkers spent a week recording the musical, food, religious and handcraft traditions of the Perth Greek community. Dr John Yiannakis, then a Research Associate at Curtin University, facilitated most of the contacts for this phase of the project, working through the Australian Folklore Research Unit.

The second week involved documenting the life histories and traditions of timber workers and their families as well as bush railways, with a particular emphasis on the now-sunken timber town of Banksiadale. As well as reminiscences, stories and other traditions, this aspect of the project also turned up substantial manuscript and photographic materials. The project was assisted substantially by Mr Stephen Smith, then Director of the Australian Regional Research Unit at Curtin University.

Overall, fourteen extended interviews were conducted, together with the documenting of a Greek social function. These have been copied, indexed and illustrated for housing at the NLA and the WA Folklore Archive.

The 2006 phase of the project involved an investigation of the oral history and traditions of the Western Australian whaling industry, including Cheyne’s Beach Whaling Station, Albany (now Whale World). Some elements of this activity were a follow-up to a joint project conducted by NLA and the State Library of WA in the early 1990s. This year, the fieldwork also involved the WA Irish community music, song, dance and other traditions, child migration and migration traditions from Persia, Iran and India. A concert of music and songs from the sheet music collection of the State Library of Western Australia was also recorded. A total of nineteen extended recordings were made.

In 2007 Rob and Olya Willis and Graham Seal presented aspects of the WA Folklife Project fieldwork at the Fairbridge Festival, with a particular emphasis on child migration. A further six interviews were carried out, mainly follow-ups to the previous year’s Irish and child migration traditions, as well as one on World War 2 prisoner of war songs.

No fieldwork was conducted in 2008, but in 2009, the fieldworkers visited twice. InJune, in conjunction with the ARC Linkage project ‘Traditions of Childhood’, they spent a week at Geraldton Primary School to document children’s playground traditions.The following week they visited Geraldton and Kalbarri for interviews with members of Nunda community regarding oral traditions of their Dutch shipwreck ancestry, together with other local folklore. These interviews were carried out in conjunction with an ongoing Curtin-led research project on the pre-1788 European settlement of Australia.

In August, the fieldworkers spent two weeks in Perth and Fremantle interviewing Australian submariners, the creative arts community, folk revival performers and local newspaper proprietors. Nine extended interviews were recorded.

Full details of interviewees, recordings, indexes, photographs and video may be accessed through the Oral History and Folklore section of the National Library of Australia and the WA Folklore Archive, John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, Curtin University, Perth.

The appearance of a book about Cape Barren songman Ronnie Summers, prompts some reflections on Australian music traditions.

Ronnie’s music combines blues, Cajun, Irish and country influences into a distinctive Cape Barren style that embraces such apparent diversities as nineteenth century schottische tunes, the Carter Family, the Cape Barren Island Football Song and his own compositions. Ronnie – and the community of Cape barren musicians of which he is a part – take these various influences and meld them into a distinctive regional style and repertoire.

A number of other books, articles and recordings have also revealed strong and distinctive musical fusions in places like Lord Howe, Pitcairn and Norfolk islands, the music of Torres Strait recorded by Ron Edwards, Karl Neuenfeldt and Nigel Pegrum and Darwin string bands researched by Jeff Corfield, to mention only some. Ongoing fieldwork by Rob and Olya Willis has identified a strong fusion of British (Irish and English) indigenous and country music in the Nulla Nulla region of NSW, an area that produced, among other country performers, Slim Dusty. There are no doubt plenty more known to probably only a few collectors and many more yet to be discovered.

This work combines to give us a broader understanding of Australian folk music as being almost entirely the ‘bush ballad’. Bush song and music is a vitally important element of our musical heritage, derived from mainly British oral and broadside ballad traditions, heavily influenced by the Kiplingesque adaptations of writers like Lawson and Paterson, among many others. It was also heavily influenced by American popular music of the nineteenth century, probably transmitted largely through travelling minstrel shows and similar USA-based or inspired entertainments that toured extensively here. It is an important musical genre of the past that may even still be important among some agricultural and pastoral communities.

But it is clear now bush music is very far from being our only folk musical genre. (And even within that field, broadly defined, there are many still-to-be fully researched elements, such as the role of women’s music-making, particularly with the piano, as demonstrated in Jennifer Gall’s recently completed PhD thesis).

We can now appreciate Australian traditional music and song as a probably very great number of regional styles and repertoires characterised by at least three identifiable elements:

Ethnic – in the sense of deriving from a variety of cultural traditions. Often these styles are kept alive within the relevant migrant groups. Irish fiddling and singing styles, for instance; Greek rebetika; Maltese Ghana, and so on.

Regional – evolve from and through the historical experience and environmental and occupational aspects (pearl diving, tobacco growing, mutton birding, farming) of particular places – islands; locales with a distinctive sense of identity often created by natural features such as mountains, valleys, forests, etc.

displaying multiple influences from other traditions and styles, including but not necessarily restricted to blues, country, Cajun, some religious music, twentieth century pop, as well as the often already multicultural musical mixtures of the earlier tradition, which included European social dance music, popular music of the period/s

Many of these influences have not come directly from the many migrant groups who have arrived here since 1947, but from advances in technology, including recording, radio, TV, film and the internet. You no longer need to be Irish to play any particular style of Irish fiddle (probably you never needed to be, but being brought up in such a musical tradition was a very strong factor in learning that style. Now anyone can learn it and sound just as ‘authentic’). The global recording industry invention of ‘world music’ has been another important influence, particularly through the burgeoning music festival scene that includes such eclectic events as Womad and the Woodford Festival, among others.

The overall picture that emerges from this is of a diverse, rich and frequently interacting cornucopia of musical styles and genres that go to make up what we might reasonably call an Australian folk music tradition. The second important point here is that, as with all healthy folk traditions, music is continually changing. While tradition is often thought of and described as ‘hidebound’ or conservative it is also a mechanism that allows for gradual change, if within relatively constrained parameters. This is how musical traditions have always evolved and adapted, and how they always will as long as human beings are doing the playing.